‘Welcome to Wrexham’: Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney on Getting Vulnerable, Rejuvenating a City and Gearing Up for Dramatic Season 2:

As far as unexpected show business stories go, the late 2020 news that actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney were taking on ownership of Wrexham AFC — a historic football club then playing in the fifth division of the English football system, nestled in a modest working-class community in northeast Wales — certainly qualified as a shocker. Comparatively, it was less surprising to later learn that the two were also creating a docuseries chronicling their maiden voyage as chairmen of the club, with camera crews following Wrexham’s 2021-22 season as the team attempted to secure promotion into the upper rungs of English football for the first time in well over a decade.

What was surprising, however, was realizing that the docuseries in question, FX’s “Welcome to Wrexham,” is only obliquely the story of two Hollywood stars bumbling into the world of football. 

“If you’re just reading the headlines, you probably think, ‘Oh, this show is going to be funny,’” Reynolds says. “It’s gonna be a fish-out-of-water story about two schmucky showbiz morons going in, falling on their asses, learning as they go. But the show literally does not center us. It centers the town.”

Executive producing the series with Boardwalk Pictures and others, Reynolds and McElhenney largely ceded the spotlight to Wrexham itself, following players, coaches, pub owners, long-suffering fans and community members as they adjust to the unexpected media attention, share their stories of disappointment and resilience, and gradually start to believe that both the team and the town have a chance at something better. 

Spoiler alert: Wrexham AFC did not achieve promotion in the season chronicled by “Welcome to Wrexham,” falling just short in heartbreaking fashion. Second spoiler alert: Wrexham finally did achieve promotion in the 2022-23 season, in excruciatingly down-to-the-wire circumstances, and that will be the subject of Season 2. But even knowing those results beforehand doesn’t diminish the impact of the stories on display.

As McElhenney puts it: “There’s a certain specific kind of hope that comes from unity, and the unification of a community, and the football ultimately becomes kind of a metaphor for that larger thing.”

You have a huge number of people that you follow throughout this series, some connected to the club, many of whom aren’t at all. How did you figure out whose stories to tell?

Rob McElhenney: That was the work of the field producers from Boardwalk who just started walking around and asking questions. And they approached it the way journalists might, talking to people and digging into the town and its love for this club.

Ryan Reynolds: They were bursting from the ground and falling from the trees everywhere you looked. We didn’t have enough time to cover all of them. That’s always the wonderful thing about doing a docuseries, is that your job is just to listen. You can either jam something into your pre-existing vision or you can listen and allow it to become what it’s meant to become. Thankfully we did the latter. Ultimately, we got very lucky because even if you’re not rooting for Rob or Ryan, it’s pretty hard not to root for this town.

How difficult was it to come to Wrexham with a camera crew, asking the community to open up about their personal lives, at the same time you’re trying to win trust as the new owners of their football club?

Reynolds: It was so weird. I think it’s easy to sit here and look at it like it’s a TED Talk, where we can say, “This is how we did it, and this is why we’re so great to have thought of this thing.” But the truth is we didn’t know a fucking thing when we went in there. We knew our hearts were in the right place, we knew we had an agenda that centered on them, not us. But other than that, we didn’t have a clue. Then you start to see what’s working, and water those plants a little more and watch them grow. Suddenly people are embracing the cameras all around, and — not to be too esoteric about it — realizing that these cameras are communicating the story of Wrexham to the rest of the planet. 

I’d never done anything where I was part of a docuseries, and I really struggled at the beginning. There’s a moment in the series where I’m joking that I didn’t know that I had the option to not appear on camera all the time. And that was true! I really wasn’t super comfortable with it. Halfway through, I eventually started to forget that there were cameras there and was able to kind of let it go and be emotional — even if that means you say something where your foot might end up in your mouth.

McElhenney: It was definitely a war of attrition with Ryan, who was very clearly uncomfortable from the very beginning. I treated that with as much respect as I could, bringing cameras to speak with everybody else. People assume that because we’re used to having cameras around us that we’re comfortable having them document our private lives, and nothing could be further from the truth. It puts you in a very vulnerable position, because there’s nowhere to hide and all that people see is you. What you see on the show is Ryan, what you see is me and what you see is that town. Although I recognized that I’m coming at it from a different perspective [as an executive producer], because even though being on camera might be somewhat vulnerable for me, I’m in a certain position of power when I’m looking at the footage coming in, because I can dictate what goes in the show and what doesn’t. I have a tremendous amount of empathy and respect for that. After the first episode aired, I was grateful to hear from several people that there was a collective sigh of relief that we weren’t there to make exploitative television, we were there to celebrate them.

There are definitely some stark moments, like in the second episode where you have a coaching change and several players who are not signed on to new contracts, where you focus entirely on what those decisions mean for these people.

McElhenney: Those were really difficult moments. You realize this is not a game, this is not a television show, these are people’s lives. We do not take any of that lightly, and we were on camera making those decisions. But it was a conscious choice to not put that into the documentary, because it didn’t seem fair to the people who were going through the real difficult thing in that situation to focus it on us, as if our agony was more important than theirs. It certainly was not.

When the series starts, the pandemic is still ongoing. Was there a point where you realized that this was partially the story of a town finally coming together after lockdown?

Reynolds: I think it’s less about a town emerging from the pandemic and more about a town emerging from post-Thatcherism. A town that was pretty much wiped out, many of their core industries gone, people doing the best with what they can. I think that was the theme that was more prevalent in the faces, words and actions of the people in the town. The club is kind of a conduit for the town, and how it’s hard to trust something when things have been so difficult for so long.

How did you have to change your approach to the season after you knew that Wrexham had just missed out on promotion? How far along were you at that point?

McElhenney: It was devastating. We had two or three episodes already done and edited. We had all of these high hopes that there was going to be a happy ending, and we had to sit down and make the rest of the series knowing that it was going to have this tragic end — and figure out how to approach it. Maybe it was just me justifying the loss so that I could feel better, but I remember having many conversations with Ryan saying, “We knew that we had a second season already picked up, and we knew that we were gonna start filming again in a few months … as a chairman, this is terrible. But as a storyteller, it’s really not that bad?”

I mean, Rocky didn’t win at the end of the first “Rocky.” Because the point wasn’t that he beat Apollo Creed, it was that he proved to himself that he mattered, and he could keep getting up. So, we knew there was an ending to the story there that could be profound. But it definitely sets up an expectation for Season 2. Because there really is no “Rocky II” where Rocky loses to Apollo Creed again.

Reynolds:  But all roads lead to here, so no regrets at all. I’m so grateful for the experiences of that first big season, even with the fact that the club didn’t get promoted, because it laid the groundwork for one of the most exciting seasons, I think, in National League football history. I don’t think I’ve ever felt anxiety ratcheted up like [at the end of the 2022-23 season]. It wasn’t enjoyable for me. It was hell going into the Notts County game this year, actual hell. The fact that the team managed to pull it out in the last second was so perfectly Wrexham. Wrexham always finds some way to string out the drama until you’re quite convinced your heart has beat its last beat. There’s that football expression that Rob taught me: “Squeaky bum time.” I now completely understand squeaky bum time. 

View this article at Variety.